Ion pumps

An ion pump (also referred to as a sputter ion pump) is a type of vacuum pump capable of reaching pressures as low as 10⁻¹¹ mbar under ideal conditions. An ion pump ionizes gas within the vessel it is attached to and employs a strong electrical potential, typically 3–7 kV, which allows the ions to accelerate into and be captured by a solid electrode and its residue.

The first ion pump was invented by Varian Associates, now Agilent. The original activity of Varian, co-founded in 1948 by Russell Varian, the inventor of the Klystron, and his brother Sigurd, was in the field of microwave electron tubes. Robert Jepsen joined the company in 1951 and soon became director of the Klystron research group. His investigation about electronic vacuum pumping led in 1957 to the realization of the first sputter ion pump (SIP), later named VacIon pump, of which he was co-inventor. The pump was developed as an appendage pump for maintaining Ultra High Vacuum (UHV) in microwave power tubes after processing, but soon after honeycomb-shaped anodes and commercial VacIon pumps with speeds of thousands of liters per second were produced. Lewis Hall and John Helmer were members of the research team, involved in the choice of the most suitable cathode material and in the optimization of the ion pump design. Sherm Rutherford joined Varian in February 1959 in the Central Research Department (which, soon after, spun off the Vacuum Division). His activity, working for Robert Jepsen, was to study the behavior of the sputter ion pump (in terms of pumping speed and discharge intensity I/P) over a wide range of parameters, such as magnetic field, voltage, anode cell diameter, anode cell length and pressure. Renn Zaphiropoulos joined the Vacuum Division in 1959 and was engaged in scaling up the ion pump from the original appendage pump to a full range of large pumps up to 5000 l/s . His group worked on high voltage feedthroughs, magnets, control units, systems, flanges, valves, sorption pumps and Titanium Sublimation Pumps (TSP). In 1960 the “slotted” titanium cathode, named “Super VacIon Pump”, was introduced on the basis of observations about noble gas pumping mechanism and unstable Argon pumping phenomena. In the same years triode pumps were invented by W.M. Brubaker (Consolidated Electrodynamics Corporation) and Varian, now Agilent, began to sell them in the late ‘60s under the name “Noble Ion Pumps”, then changed the name to “Triode Ion Pumps” in the early ‘70s.

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